Movies about LGBTQ+ people may be more prevalent than ever in the contemporary American film scene, but their focus largely remains on issues of identity, and rarely desire. That is to say: we have a lot of films about queer people coming to terms with who they are, but less about the very erotics that presumably define them. It’s a tricky (and perhaps too subtle) distinction, but it’s the difference between a coming out tale and, say, a story about cruising. The former is still a familiar genre (see Alan Ball’s most recent film, the 1970s-set Uncle Frank, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival), while the latter is an outlier (Eliza Hittman’s little-seen 2017 Beach Rats comes to mind).
This mirrors the political climate in the United States, where the issue of understanding sexual orientation as an identity marker has been instrumental in securing civil rights and protections. When married to storytelling, though, this devotion to who we are as opposed to how we desire means a flattening of possible narratives. Activists may (and should) clamor for more queer visibility and better representation, but the thorny complexities of sexual attraction risk being left behind if nearly every narrative must offer palatable visions of gay life that proceed from but all but rebuke sex.
Thankfully, one need only look further afield. Whether in France’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, where lesbian desire all but scorches this big-screen love story; Argentina’s End of the Century, which is all about a dreamy hookup that explores gay male intimacy across decades; Guatemala’s José, which follows a young man’s various online hookups in his very Catholic country, or even Georgia’s And Then We Danced, which takes on budding same-sex attraction within a conservative traditional dance troupe, you find exciting stories about the pleasures and perils of desire all over the globe. These aren’t mere tidy narratives about characters who need to come out and embrace who they are (though there are elements of that). Instead, they are electric explorations of sexual attraction, at times exceeding and at others all but ignoring identity labels altogether.
Moreover, while often prudish American sensibilities can keep mainstream representations of queer sex shrouded in gentle pans or tasteful close-ups (when they’re depicted at all), films produced abroad can at times feel unabashedly revelatory. In the last decade alone, for example, France has produced projects like Sorry Angel, Sauvage/Wild, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo, and Stranger by the Lake — all steamy flicks where frank sex scenes become integral to their storytelling. The intimacy of the bedroom (or the sex club, or the cruising beach) is not a private space best left off-screen but fertile ground on which to examine queer desire.
For The Hollywood Reporter film critic Boyd van Hoeij, these comparisons speak to more complicated differences. “In Western Europe, nudity, sex and desire (whether LGBTQ or not) are, very generally speaking, more commonly depicted and accepted than violence; the opposite seems to be true in the U.S,” van Hoeij tells them. But to reduce it to such a cultural divide is to miss, he adds, a key element that distinguishes what kinds of queer films get made both in the U.S. and abroad. “State-funded film financing in Europe ensures that filmmakers can explore personal issues — including identity, sex and sexuality, desire — in films that don’t have to make a profit or even break even. The opposite is true in the U.S., where films are a commercial endeavor that needs to make money and appeal to the largest possible audience.” And so, while there have been some raunchy gay films in the U.S. (think of Eating Out and Another Gay Movie), they remain outliers, exceptions that merely prove the rule.
But it’s not just about showing explicit depictions of sex. A film like Moonlight, for example, exudes and depends on its focus on same-sex desire. Truly an exception to its American peers, the Oscar-winning film lingers on the way Chiron gazes at Kevin and yearns for him — even as it’s attentive to not make his journey one of attaching himself to a self-fashioning label that will make him legible to the world. Jenkins and writer Tarell Alvin McCraney zero in instead on his experience, leaving rainbow flag waving at the door.
